Sometimes I struggle with prayer… no, let’s be honest, most days I struggle with prayer... okay, OKAY, if I'm not in Church I always struggle with prayer. I’m lazy and procrastinate, but then, perhaps some of you do too?
I've tried a few things to help, they work for a while, but then they drop off and I'm in that same old prayer wilderness. My favourite ploy is to put a palm cross in the left hand window of my car. Every time I look left it reminds me to say a prayer, thank God, bless the occupants of the car next to me, that kind of thing. But after a while the cross falls down or my youngest pulls it out, deconstructs it and then we can't get it back together again. And so I go the rest of the year without regular prayer.
This week I intend to change that with a trick an old friend taught me. He taught me that Jesus gave us the perfect prayer. If you’re about my age or older you will remember rattling through the Lord’s Prayer every morning in school assembly. My friend showed me that this prayer is perfect in every way, yet we rush through it like cheap wine, when we should be savouring every drop like fine cognac.
Let’s start by breaking the prayer down into several sections, obviously starting at the beginning:
Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Say those words out loud slowly, what do they mean to you? We often rush this prayer, but like pulling away at a road junction, it should take you some time to build up to speed.
“Our Father who art in heaven” - I have an excellent relationship with my father. Yeah, sure it was strained at times, if I’m honest, largely because of me. I think the pattern of my relationship with him went something like this: I loved him unconditionally until about age 11 or 12, in my teenage years I started getting annoyed with him, then in my early 20s I found him embarrassingly annoying. But from about my mid-20s I fell back in love with him, head over heels, and that love grows stronger and stronger by the day.
When I recite that first line of the prayer, I'm reminded of how much love I have for my father and in parallel how much love I have for my father in heaven. If for just a minute I sit back and count the ways my own father has loved and cared for me, corrected me and guided me, then I compare this to my heavenly father, I get blown away. Which leads onto the second line and it’s almost a thank you....."Hallowed be your name"........Forever glorious, above everything, in everything and responsible for things in the universe so beautiful that I can only barely fathom them.
My Father in Heaven, thank you for loving me and creating me and giving me a place in your cosmos, Lord I shall sing your name forever more because of the gift you have given me. Amen.
Steve Fogo
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